ScrapeGraphAI Pricing, Reviews, Pros & Cons (2026)
Most of what you'll find about ScrapeGraphAI online is self-published by the company itself. That makes it hard to get a straight answer on whether the tool actually delivers. We dug into real user tests, credit math, and community feedback to put together this breakdown - no marketing fluff.
30-Second Verdict
Use this if: You're a Python developer who wants natural-language scraping and you're comfortable prompt-tuning for clean output.
Skip this if: You need reliable, automation-ready data at scale. An n8n community test returned 72 rows for 52 products. AppSumo verified buyers rate it 2.6/5. A FahimAI deep-dive gave it 4.5/5. That gap tells you everything.
What Is ScrapeGraphAI?
ScrapeGraphAI is an open-source Python library (MIT license) and a paid hosted API that uses LLMs to extract structured data from websites. Instead of writing CSS selectors, you describe what you want in plain English and the model handles extraction logic.
It supports multiple LLM backends - GPT, Gemini, Groq, and local models via Ollama. The open-source library and the paid API are distinct products, which matters when reading reviews. Complaints about one don't always apply to the other.
Pricing Breakdown
ScrapeGraphAI runs on a credit system. SmartScraper, the core endpoint, costs 10 credits per page.
Paid plans are billed yearly with a 15% savings, and the pricing page expresses credits as credits per year delivered upfront. To make comparison easier, the table below shows effective monthly page capacity if you spread those annual credits across 12 months.
| Plan | Price/mo | Credits | SmartScraper Pages | Cost/Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 (one-time) | 5 (one-time) | N/A |
| Starter | $17 | 60,000/yr | ~500/mo | ~$0.034 |
| Growth | $85 | 480,000/yr | ~4,000/mo | ~$0.021 |
| Pro | $425 | 3,000,000/yr | ~25,000/mo | ~$0.017 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Credit costs vary by endpoint. SearchScraper burns 30 credits per page. Markdownify costs 2. AgenticScraper costs 15 plus 10 per additional step - that adds up fast.
Here's the thing: ScrapeGraphAI's own blog post about pricing lists different numbers than their pricing page. The blog says Starter is $20/mo, Growth is $100/mo, Pro is $500/mo. We checked both pages ourselves and we're using the pricing page as canonical. The inconsistency doesn't inspire confidence.
Overage pricing runs $9 per extra 1,700 credits on Starter - roughly $0.053 per SmartScraper page, a 56% premium over your base rate.
Our take: At $0.034 per page on Starter, ScrapeGraphAI is one of the priciest AI scrapers per page on the market. You're paying for the LLM magic. Whether that magic works consistently enough to justify the premium is the real question - and right now, for most production use cases, it doesn't.
ScrapeGraphAI costs $0.034 per page and still gives you unverified data. Prospeo finds and verifies emails at $0.01 each with 98% accuracy - no scraping, no cleanup, no bounced sends.
Skip the scraping tax. Get verified emails directly.
Pros
- Natural-language prompts eliminate brittle CSS selectors. Describe what you want, get structured JSON back.
- Multi-LLM flexibility. Swap between GPT-4o, Gemini, Groq, or run locally with Ollama - no vendor lock-in on the model side.
- MCP server integration connects AI assistants like Claude Desktop directly to live web scraping, which is useful for RAG pipelines.
- Playwright support handles JavaScript-rendered dynamic content out of the box.
Cons
The n8n community test tells the story best. A tester scraped a product listing page with 52 items. Parsera returned a clean 52-for-52. ScrapeGraphAI returned 72 rows with inconsistent columns, no image URLs, and required manual cleanup. That single test consumed roughly 20% of the free-tier credits. Parsera used about 5%.
Beyond that test, verified buyer feedback on AppSumo surfaces recurring problems:
- Playground-to-API gap. Queries that work perfectly in the UI return garbage via the API. One buyer got a single result from an Amazon query that returned full data in the Playground.
- GitHub issues closed without fixes. A SearchGraph issue where university contact extraction returned mostly "NA" values was closed "as not planned."
- Local model setup is painful. A Reddit user testing with Ollama 3.1 reported "nothing worked".
- No bulk CSV workflow. You can't upload a URL list and get batch results back. For production scraping, that's a dealbreaker.
- The free tier is a demo. 50 one-time credits equals 5 SmartScraper pages - barely enough to test one use case.
ScrapeGraphAI vs. Firecrawl
| ScrapeGraphAI Starter | Firecrawl Hobby | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $17/mo | $16/mo |
| Pages (scrape) | ~500 | 3,000 |
| Cost/page | ~$0.034 | ~$0.005 |
| AI extraction | Yes (LLM) | Yes (LLM) |
Firecrawl delivers roughly 6x more pages per dollar at the entry tier because its scrape endpoint costs 1 credit per page versus ScrapeGraphAI's 10. Per Zyte's summary of the December 2025 Proxyway benchmark, Firecrawl managed a 33.69% success rate against 15 protected sites at 2 req/s. ScrapeGraphAI wasn't included in that benchmark. Neither tool is built for anti-bot bypass - for protected sites, dedicated proxy services like Zyte or ScraperAPI are better bets.
Verify Before You Send
Let's be honest about something most scraping guides skip: scraped emails are unverified by definition. Send to them raw and you're torching your domain reputation. We've seen teams burn through months of sender warmup because they blasted a list of scraped contacts without checking a single address.
Prospeo verifies emails in real time with 98% accuracy on a 7-day refresh cycle. The free tier covers 75 emails per month - enough to validate your scraping workflow before you scale it up. If you're building a pipeline around scraped contacts, pair verification with a clear email bounce rate target and a plan to improve sender reputation.
Scraped contact lists destroy domain reputation. Every unverified email you send is a gamble. Prospeo's 5-step verification and 7-day data refresh keep your bounce rate under 4% - just like the teams that tripled their pipeline with us.
Validate your scraped lists before they burn your domain.
FAQ
Is ScrapeGraphAI free?
The open-source Python library is free under MIT and works with local or cloud LLMs. The hosted API's free tier gives you 50 one-time credits - about 5 SmartScraper pages. Paid plans start at $17/mo for 60,000 annual credits.
How many credits does each endpoint cost?
SmartScraper costs 10 credits per page, SearchScraper costs 30, Markdownify costs 2, and AgenticScraper costs 15 plus 10 per additional step. On the Starter plan, that puts SmartScraper at roughly $0.034 per page.
How should I handle scraped contact data?
Always verify scraped emails before outreach. Sending to unverified addresses causes bounces that damage sender reputation - and once that reputation tanks, it's painful to rebuild. Tools like Prospeo verify in real time with 98% accuracy and a 7-day refresh cycle, and the free tier covers 75 verifications per month, which is enough to test any scraping pipeline.
Is ScrapeGraphAI accurate enough for production?
Based on community tests and AppSumo reviews, accuracy is inconsistent. The n8n benchmark returned 72 rows for 52 products, and multiple verified buyers report a gap between Playground results and API output. For production workloads, budget serious time for prompt tuning and output validation - or consider alternatives like Firecrawl or Parsera that showed better consistency in head-to-head tests.